New Startup provides electricity in rural Haiti
RE-VOLT is a startup that brings affordable and reliable electricity to families in rural Haiti and is running a crowdfunding campaign to help fund the expansion of its service to more customers.
Through the installation of a system consisting of a solar panel, a power storage unit, several lights and a phone charger, RE-VOLT is bringing power to the people in rural Haitian homes for the first time.
Customers are charged a low monthly fee of 250 Haitian Gourdes (about US$5) and pay for the service through Digicel’s proprietary Mon Cash mobile banking platform. The units themselves contain a cellular antenna allowing RE-VOLT to manage payments and maintenance remotely.
RE-VOLT recently launched a campaign on crowdfunding site Indiegogo in order to raise the working capital necessary to grow its customer base on La Gonave to 2,000 households or 10,000 people by January 2016.
Founded by Digicel Haiti chairman, Maarten Boute, RE-VOLT currently serves over 800 customer households, or about 4,000 people, on the island of La Gonave, one of the most isolated and impoverished communities in Haiti. An on-the-ground sales team made up of La Gonave locals goes door-to-door to find new customers and makes regular visits to open-air markets, a central part of daily life in rural Haiti. The team also performs basic maintenance and troubleshooting on installed systems.
The idea for RE-VOLT’s business model came to Boute over five years ago in the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake. At the time, he was two months into his tenure as CEO of Digicel Haiti, having previously served as the company’s chief operating officer.
Under Boute’s leadership, Digicel Haiti’s subscriber base grew from under 2 million customers in 2010 to over 4.5 million in 2014, when Boute relinquished his duties as Digicel Haiti’s CEO to co-found RE-VOLT along with former Digicel executive, Darragh Dolan
“You would visit these villages and people are spending around a fifth of their day’s wages to pay a guy on the street with a generator to charge their phone,” says Dolan. “It bothered us every time we saw it. There had to be a better way.”
Boute and Dolan are enthusiastic about RE-VOLT’s future. According to Dolan, “We think there’s massive potential for us to provide additional services such as Wi-Fi hotspots, not to mention systems with better power generation and storage capabilities. We think this business would work in other emerging markets, although we’re very focused on growing our footprint in Haiti at present.”